DrIvan Herman
Who am I?
I graduated as mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI I joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where I worked for 6 years (and turned into a computer scientist…). I left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry in Munich, Germany, I joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where I have a tenure position since 1988. I received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. I joined the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Team as Head of W3C Offices in January 2001 while maintaining my position at CWI. I served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when I was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position, which is now my principal work at W3C.
Before joining W3C I worked in quite different areas (distributed and dataflow programming, language design, system programming), but I spend most of my research years in computer graphics and information visualization. I also participated in various graphics related ISO standardization activities and software developments. My “professional” home page contains a list of my publications (see also my Mendeley account), my public presentations, and details of the various projects I participated in the past. There is also a dblp entry for my publications generated automatically (although I am not sure it is complete…). (B.t.w., based on my publications, my Erdős number is ≤4…)
In my previous life (i.e., before joining W3C…) I was member of the Executive Committee of the Eurographics Association for 15 years, and I was vice-chair of the Association between 2000 and 2002. I was the co-chair of the 9th World Wide Web Conference, in Amsterdam, May 2000; since then, I have also been member of IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), responsible for the World Wide Web Conference series. Since autumn 2007 I am also member of SWSA (Semantic Web Science Association), the committee responsible for the International Semantic Web Conferences (better known as “ISWC”) series.
Some personal data
- The Hungarian spelling of my full name is Herman Iván. Ie, my name is Ivan (well, spelled properly: Iván) and my surname is Herman (many in the Netherlands and in Germany mix it up, and use “Herman” as my name… this is aggravated by the fact that, uniquely in Europe, the Hungarian custom is to put surname first).
- Gender: male
- Family: I am married and have an adult son, David.
- Date and city of birth: 24th February, 1955, Budapest, Hungary
- Email addresses: ‘ivan’ on my own ivan-herman.net domain, ‘ivan’ on the w3.org domain, or ‘ivan.herman’ on the cwi.nl domain
- (Mobile) Phone: +31-641044153
- Skype ID: ivan_herman
- I live in Amstelveen (see also geonames), the Netherlands (lat: 52.302063, long: 4.87397). This is a suburb of Amsterdam. The closest airport is Amsterdam Schiphol
- I am the administrator of the Semantic Web Activity Blog at W3C which can either be accessed directly or via its RSS feed.
- Interests: Semantic Web (of course…), but also Scalable Vector Graphics, Internationalization. On a less techie level classical music, literature, history, politics in general, photography, art (painting, sculpture), architecture, …
I can also be identified through the non-information resource URI: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf#me (when dereferenced, the URI redirects to this page for (X)HTML, and to the generated foaf file otherwise).
This file is in XHTML+RDFa. Running the file through an RDFa processor yields the corresponding foaf file in RDF. I have borrowed and adapted the ‘tranquile’ style of Dave Shea from the CSS Zen Garden site.